Film Review: Icarus

Icarus (2017; Directed by Bryan Fogel)

Icarus begins as one kind of documentary film and ends up as quite another. Its director, Bryan Fogel, is also a high-level amateur cyclist, and early in the film humblebraggily notes that he finished 14th in the Haute Route, considered to be the premier amateur cycling race in the world. Despite the strong finish, Fogel found that the discrepancy between himself and the top racers was so wide that he suspected that the use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) was as rampant in top-tier amateur cycling as it infamously has been in professional cycling. With this in mind, he decides to put himself on PEDs for a year leading up to the next edition of the Haute Route, tracking and documenting his progress and improvement on camera (call it Super Dope Me, if you like).

To ensure his own health and safety as well as to optimize his results and chances of passing anti-doping tests, Fogel decides to work with experienced and accredited scientists. His first choice for consultation, the founder and head of UCLA’s doping laboratory, backs out, concerned about his reputation when it becomes clear that Fogel wants to show how to dope and get away with it. He recommends instead a Russian scientist and the head of Russia’s ant-doping program, Grigory Rodchenkov. With loose morals, voluble good humour, and a suspicious amount of experience in evading doping controls, Rodchenkov puts Fogel on a sophisticated and mildly alarming PED regimen.

Due to non-physically-related setbacks, Fogel finished lower in the Haute Route standings than he did the previous year, despite his program of doping. But along the way he gains a good friend in Rodchenkov and stumbles upon an inside view of one of the biggest and most explosive stories in the long but mostly-shadowy history of sports doping. It becomes clear fairly quickly to Fogel that Rodchenkov knows so much about cheating sports doping controls because it was precisely his job in Russia to help athletes to do so, not to catch them at it.

Rodchenkov soon confides in Fogel and his camera, and later in the New York Times and the U.S. Department of Justice, that every Russian Olympic athlete at the 2008 and 2012 Olympics was using PEDs and that he and his lab worked to ensure that they were not caught. Not only that, but at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia (which were even more awash in steroid use for domestic propaganda purposes after Russia’s weaker showing in 2010 in Vancouver, where drug tests were more difficult to get around), Rodchenkov and his staff worked with state secret police to swap Russian athletes’ PED-laced urine samples for clean ones in the IOC-sanctioned anti-doping lab itself. All of this was done with the clear knowledge and even expressed direction of the Russian Minister of Sport, who answers directly to President Vladimir Putin himself.

Struck by guilt after his team’s work turned Sochi into a podium-finish and propaganda success that Putin parlayed into a power-move into Ukraine, Rodchenkov’s revelations went public as Fogel filmed him in 2015 and 2016, leading to the entire Russian track and field team (and quite nearly all Russian Olympic athletes period) being banned from competition at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Fleeing Russia and fearing for his life, Rodchenkov is finally put into protective custody and witness relocation by the Department of Justice.

This is a heck of a story and Fogel knows it, but the more thematic framing of Rodchenkov’s perspective on his actions can feel a bit off, even heavy-handed. Rodchenkov is a devotee of George Orwell’s 1984, and the seminal book is quoted liberally in Icarus; the Greek mythology title isn’t nearly as justified as the Orwell connection, which can be patchy of its own accord. He feels that he was like Winston Smith, sunk in the constant pretentious lie of doublethink as he ran a purportedly anti-doping operation while actually running a prolific doping operation.

Icarus makes a belated point, though not a particularly forceful one, that the Orwellian doublethink at the core of Russia’s sports doping system reflects more generally on Putin’s discourse of propaganda and power in his modern Russia. Perhaps Fogel could have made this point sharper without his early focus on his own PED regimen, or his detailing of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s efforts, or his decision to humanize and thus build empathy for Rodchenkov (some left-field animation sequences don’t help, including the surrealist image of a crumpled, seated Rodchenkov with a stag’s antlers growing out of skull). Icarus is a fascinating and strong documentary, but the unanticipated sharp turn that makes its narrative so striking might also weaken its impact.